Thursday, March 28, 2013

Revit 2014 Properties Palette Tabs

If you use Revit MEP you know how little screen space you can end up with if you open up the Properties Palette, Project Browser, System Browser and Reconcile Hosting dialogs at the same time. You can shrink them down pretty small but then they don't function very well. Sure you can close and open them as needed or put them on a second monitor too.

Revit 2014 offers another option, nest them on the Properties Palette and provide tabs for each so you can switch back and forth.

Jury is still out on this for me. I set it up and used it this way for quite awhile but kept forgetting where and which tab was active. One recurring comment was to have the focus or active tab switch to properties when elements are selected but I'm not sure if that worked its way into the final production release.

It is a little tricky at first to get them hosted on the palette, easy once you know how. Just click on the dialog title bar, drag it either to the title bar on the Properties Palette or over the tab(s) at the bottom of the palette. Either way you'll get a ghost of the overlay and a new tab will appear. Don't let go if you don't see the new tab appear, means it isn't going to work.

The RTM version of Revit 2014 doesn't have the auto switching to PP if an element has been selected unfortunately. I'm another who wishes this was the case.

It is also worth noting that as an API developer we can now host our own WPF forms within the new UI Docking framework which is exciting. Unfortunately for the RTM version this is to buggy to put into practice but hopefully Web Update 1 will fix this.

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